Last weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. My mom's inquiry about my holiday prompted me to reflect about my recent growth. I couldn't just answer in a few words. As this is a long post, I have bolded key phrases so that you can skip to what interests you. And I’ll be posting it in more manageable chunks.
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, the evening the holiday began, I asked the servant at my house (a whole other topic of discussion) to cook dinner, and I performed and explained the table rituals to 3 of my friends. I thought about you all, but I was happy to experience the holiday in a new way, with my present family around me. I went to synagogue with one of my friends.
The Judah Hyam Synagogue (www.jewishdelhi.org) has been here for about 50 years. Currently it is being led by Ezekiel, a man who volunteers to do so and also works for the Human Rights something or other organization in Delhi. He is an Indian Jew who studied in Israel, and has been really sweet to me. Each time go to the synagogue is different because in addition to the five or so Jews of Indian origin who come, there are Jews who, like me, are living in Delhi for a time or just passing through. Ezekiel orients the service to the attendants of each particular service.
Once a big French family on vacation invited my roommate and I to eat dinner with them at their hotel across the street, the Taj Mahal. It reminded me of my family celebrating holidays together in hotel rooms, happily crammed together lighting Channukah candles. What great times we have had after dinner in smoosh piles! (That part missing). On Rosh Hashanah the service was led by Orthodox Israeli men. It was fine, but not very meaningful to me. Yom Kippur, however, was far more meaningful, partly because I had already written a large chunk of this blog post in through it understood my experiences more fully. I spent the whole day at synagogue, praying and meditating. It turns out that Ezekiel is a meditator himself.
The outside of the synagogue:
The inside of the synagogue, it's Sephardi in style, was slightly renovated by a community member before the high holidays (after this pic was taken)
The adjacent Jewish cemetery. In the background is the dwelling of the (non-Jewish) ground-keeper's family, with little kids running around:
Practicing Judaism in India, an extremely religious country, full of traditions that are new to me, highlights different parts of Judaism. Not only am I more aware of my own religious beliefs, I am also exposed to new ideas to consider.
For the first part of my trip here, I really couldn't relate to Hinduism, the majority religion. The extent to which Hinduism, as I had experienced it, is based on routine rituals and seemingly blind faith in anthropomorphized gods seemed to foreign to my own Jewish mindset. In Judaism, we are constantly warned against "idolatry," creating visual representations of God. How could I relate to a religion in which people pray to physical statues of deities? But at the synagogue I realized how these two phenomena, routine ritual and blind faith, appear in Judaism in different forms. When a Hindu gives an offering (whether it be bangles, food, money, or flowers) or prays to a deity, how is this different from a Jew who puts a note into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem or who is consumed by the need to perform a ritual commandment perfectly or pray in a specific way? How is the ritual of bringing out the Torah, parading it around the room so that people can kiss it, blessing it, reading ancient words from it, any different than the fire ceremony where a flame is circled around a deity? And in terms of blind faith, what greater proof does the Jewish tradition provide that a God exists than does Hinduism?
I realized that the qualms I have with Judaism are the same as those I have with Hinduism, just in a different form. Oh, so human of me to critique others before critiquing myself. Then some other comparisons started to emerge. Of course, there is depth behind rituals and faith in both religions, though it may be accessed in different ways and to different extents.Both religions are extremely diverse (Hinduism even more so than Judaism), and these short illustrations do not do them justice. Both religions encourage a personal relationship with divinity. Hinduism is practiced on a very individual basis wherein people are free to choose whichever deity they want to pray to, and construct shrines at home. In Judaism, individual prayers are encouraged in the context of a strong communal space.
One major difference is that mainstream Hinduism is extremely fluid, and does not contain a widely accepted specific code of behavior. While I am accustomed to emulating the qualities of God (also anthropomorphizing to say that God has qualities I could approximate) and following God’s laws, Hindu gods are presented as openly being both good and bad. The Upanishads, Hindu writings, contain concepts of morality, but there seems to be a big divide between devotion to god/s and moral practice.
The story of each religion is told extremely differently: Jewish texts are supposed to be the word of God and history of the Jewish people, while Hindu lore is largely oral, visual, and mythological. In both Hinduism and Judaism there are priests, though Cohanim (Jewish priests) were far more relevant in ancient times than today, while Brahmins (caste of Hindu priests) are relevant contemporaneously.
The entrance to a Hindu temple in Delhi dedicated to the god Hanuman, the monkey god:
A Hindu temple at Yamanotri, the source of the sacred Yamuna river (I sent some picture of this area last time). The temple is rebuilt every few years because every winter it is completely submerged in snow:
To be continued with more about what this actually means for me religiously and a general update......
